


Euphony

by WerewolvesAreReal



Category: Temeraire - Naomi Novik
Genre: Book 5: Victory of Eagles, Dover, Gen, Missing Scene, Racism, Sipho is smarter than me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-27
Updated: 2016-04-27
Packaged: 2018-06-04 18:43:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6670300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WerewolvesAreReal/pseuds/WerewolvesAreReal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Laurence is imprisoned Sipho and Demane are left adrift. Sipho does some thinking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Euphony

**Author's Note:**

> At some point I am going to do exhaustive research on the Xhosa and write something longer and better but that day is not this day.

A crowd of Yellow Reapers bursts apart like startled osprey, each one veering off into different directions as Maximus descends with faint, apologetic bemusement. In the air their rippling wings look like spinning acacia leaves, yellow-sick with an invisible illness, and bitterness sits in Sipho's throat like a clot.

It is very cold in England.

You will be sick, Demane tells him as he has said before. Demane is wearing a green-woven shirt, strange and long-sleeved in a faint parody of the aviators uniform. He stands barefoot and his shorts bare knobby knees to the world. He tries to foist a scarf on Sipho in addition to the nine-year-old's boots, his jacket, his overcoat, and Sipho fights only briefly before relenting.

People chuckle when he moves through the covert, which is just slightly better than scorn, so he does not bother hiding away. “You there,” a voice calls, “Demane – no, Sipho,” and he stops.

An aviator comes in front of him. “You have not seen much of England, have you?”

Berkley peers down at Sipho, his face pink and thick and hesitant. Sipho likes Berkley a little, mostly because Berkley is tall and has a large voice. Everyone looks the same in this country. In the covert they even dress the same.

He shakes his head.

“I'm going to the town tomorrow – you may come, if you like,” Berkley says. “I would invite Demane, but your brother is still a bit wild, I fear.”

Sipho scowls against his will, then hides the expression when Berkley frowns at him.

He nods.

“Good. Noon, then; Maximus will take us.” And he is gone.

“Wonder what we'll do with them,” someone says.

It is another aviator – a midshipman, gossiping loudly and watching Sipho with unabashed curiosity. “Laurence was a queer one,” he says. “But we can't _keep_ his charity-cases, surely?”

“Oh, hush,” says another man absently. “It is not for us to worry about,” and that is that.

Demane is in Lily's clearing when Sipho looks. Hunting. Sipho turns to Lily in question. “ _We_ do not hunt rats,” she says, not needing words to understand. “Why should they not be here?” Her luminous golden eyes flicker like fire, and when she shifts her wings are ripples of orange-poison scales.

After Temeraire, Sipho respects Lily most of all the dragons.

One of Lily's ground-crew walks over. “Don't play with vermin, what are you doing?” he demands of Demane.

Demane turns to Sipho. They are all bad hunters here, he says.

“Speak normally, if you're going to speak at all.”

Demane shakes the rat in his face and grins when the man jumps. Then he darts away, quick as a mouse, while the man is still sputtering.

Sipho slips away and lets his feet find a path. The covert is quiet, subdued – it has been subdued for days, and no one will talk about why even though they all know. Eyes dart over Sipho's head when he passes. Looks are exchanged. He is a reminder, blunt and forceful, and these grown soldiers skitter away from his approach as though he is a wraith of misfortune.

His feet take him to Temeraire's clearing and the black dragon is not there, of course. Of course.

“Hi,” says Emily Roland.

She's sitting with a book – battered, ill-kept – and her hair fluffs out raggedly from the sides of her head. She rolls to her feet and stretches, the bones of her arms twisting and bending in a way that is a little dragon-like herself. “You're doing okay, aren't you?” she asks. Sipho shrugs.

She looks at him a moment, then tucks the book under her arm. “Let's go get some dinner.”

They track down Demane where he's hanging from the rafters of the officer's quarters trying to find the best hiding places. He goes with them easily at the mention of food and people mutter as he passes, but Sipho doesn't understand the problem. Aviators scale their dragons like weapons of war, like moving mountains, living battlefields. Demane knows how to survive better than anyone – Sipho has always known this. If no one else can recognize what he's worth, that will be their loss.

“They're going to kill him, you know,” Emily says when they're in the mess hall. Demane attacks his food with a vengeance, so she directs the words at Sipho. “Not now, but eventually they will kill him.”

At first Sipho thinks she means Demane, and he nods solemnly, and then he understands she means Captain Laurence, which is a little more reassuring. “Mother will not let anything happen to you, of course,” Emily says.

Demane snorts. He finally looks up. I will not let anything happen to us, he says. They said we were useless at the village, too, and I showed everyone that I could take care of us.

Emily looks between them. So Sipho just nods and she seems reassured. “Just in case you were worried,” she says.

Nearby someone laughs. “Why are you bothering?” A cadet – someone Sipho recognizes from the classes Captain Laurence had him take, so briefly, before he left. Sipho never cared to learn his name. “They are idiots – they do not understand.”

I could call you an idiot too if I wanted to talk to you, Demane says, baring his teeth.

“He is an _animal_ ,” the cadet says. Demane grins wider.

Emily reaches out and stomps on the cadet's foot. He yelps like a startled bird, and Demane looks at Emily in admiration. “Piss off,” she says cheerfully. “Temeraire is gone, but I might still have Excidium come bite you.”

The cadet gives her a nasty look but stomps away. I like her but she is still strange, Demane says. And he tells her, “Good job.”

Emily doesn't react. “Towner is an ass,” she says, and Sipho likes her a little, too. She turns to Sipho. “I have something for you.” She hands him the text she has been carrying: _Book of Aviation,_ by Reverend Salcombe _._ “I could only manage a few pages. I imagine you will like it more than me – you seem as though you'd understand books. Are you finished, Demane? Come, I will show you where the Reapers go to chase deer.”

* * *

 

Dover is a small town, Berkley tells him, despite its proximity to the coast. Sipho thinks these English-people seem to judge _small_ the same way they measure dragons, which is to say, they have no relative idea of anything.

He hovers behind Berkley when they walk and the man seems to forget about him occasionally. Sipho taps his feet against the cobblestone streets and stops outside when Berkley ducks into a tiny shop. He looks around; a few people across the street are staring at him. Their eyes are blank and disconcertingly pale, like the eyes of dead fish that have been lying in the sun.

Sipho turns and walks away.

He keeps walking as the streets twist and narrow and widen. No one stops him. On the outskirts of the town, where the houses start to thin, there are trees and flowers planted between the buildings. Some of the trees have tightly-bunched flowers, white and acrid and cloying; all the leaves are small, shaped like little ovals, and he keeps going but finds only more of the same.

Demane is correct about another thing: these people do not know how to hunt. No one finds Sipho that first night – if they are even looking.

The town is quiet. He sleeps under a tiny strand of trees and wakes when dogs start to bark a few houses over. He finds water for himself easily enough and wanders around the roads wondering if he should try to hunt or steal some breakfast – he has never been good at either - when a voice half-familiar but still strange calls out, “You, boy. What are you doing?”

A dark man waves him over; the stranger is sitting on the steps of a grand series of buildings with dark, ruddy stones. “Are you lost?”

His voice is strangely accented; he speaks English, and Sipho does not know what tribe he might be from, but he was not born in this place. This is obvious not just in the way he speaks but in the way he moves, the way he watches Sipho stand before him and says, after a beat of silence, “Well, can you not talk?”

“The only people who have wanted to speak to me are preachers and aviators,” Sipho says. “And people who want nothing good.”

The man grins a bit. “I rather hope I'm not any of those things,” he says.

“This looks like a church, a bit.” Captain Laurence pointed out churches before – huge, grand things very unlike Mr. Erasmus' old schoolhouse where the bible was read in pieces and sections. The building has a similar sense of age.

Also, there is a giant cross in the courtyard.

But the man shakes his head. “It's a school,” he says. “The Duke of York's Royal Military School.” His voice takes a sardonic lilt. “I am a guest lecturer for the week, you see - very kind of them to take me; but you are no student here.”

“I could be,” Sipho says.

A smile. “Well, why not? Do you like learning?”

Sipho thinks again of Mr. Erasmus – his dusty books and stories of angels and hell, old dead men that destroyed each other and won nothing. But Captain Laurence taught him math and letters, neatly-scrawled loops of logic thrown together in lessons snatched during flight. “I don't know.”

“It's a fine thing,” says the man – Sipho does not even know his name. “The finest thing in the world. In academia, we delve into the flaws of philosophy, make new politics, craft entirely different systems of thought. Everyone values different opinions. Everyone wants knowledge more than anything.”

“And do they not care?” Sipho asks. In his head he sounds out this word, so English and formal, _academia._ “That you are - “

The man's smile falters. “The best do not,” he says. “The ones who matter will not look down on a man merely for the color of his skin; not all men matter, you see.”

“Some in this country will say I do not matter.”

“They will say it; they are wrong. Let us be like them. Let us be like them, and better, and better, until they cannot deny us – that is how change is made.”

Sipho thinks about this.

“My brother is the best person in the world,” he says. “He likes to eat rats. I don't think he's academic.”

“Well I hope he has a good recipe,” says the man. “He will do something else great, then – and perhaps you can be the voice for him.”

Sipho has never been the voice for anyone. But he thinks of Berkley and the faces at the covert, dismissive looks, sidelong glances; _your brother is a bit wild still._

You will get sick, Demane had said.

“How do I do that,” Sipho asks.

“First,” the man says, and now Sipho notices that he speaks very carefully, very flatly – he speaks like one of these strange pale people, with their light words and inhaled sounds. “...First, you must make sure that you can pretend.”

Sipho nods slowly. And if the man sounds a bit sad, among his foreign exhales and sighs, he will not be the one to mention it first.

* * *

 

No one stops him the whole way to the covert because no one sees him. Sipho is nine, and small, and still so young; Sipho is wiser than many, and he knows how to walk quietly when he needs it.

He finds Maximus in his clearing, where he should be. Berkley is talking with Iskierka's captain.

“Laurence will never forgive us,” Berkley groans. “Not to mention the older one – but I have searched the whole town twice over. He must be _some_ where, but, if someone took him...”

“Oh, he is somewhere,” says John Granby dryly, and points.

Berkley sputters when he sees Sipho. Maximus peers at him with interest. “Oh, you are not dead; I am glad,” he says, and lays back down contentedly.

Granby seems to take this as a cue to leave.

“So you are back,” Berkley says when Sipho comes forward. “I hope your little adventure was worth it?”

He does not really sound angry, but he is frowning. Sipho hesitates. “It was, I think,” he says quietly, and ducks his head. He peers up to catch Berkley's reaction.

The captain is staring at him in amazement. “Why, you do speak – and so well!” he says.

_Let us be like them. Let us be like them, and better, and better._

“Yes,” says Sipho, and smiles a little, and he lets Berkley lead him away under the covert's shadow as the night grows long.

 


End file.
